With the proliferation of computing systems, in all their various forms, public use of such systems has become an everyday occurrence. Many times, users will view the information displayed by their computers in such a way that the information may be viewed by other people in the devices immediate area. In most cases, the information is not highly personal or confidential and thus, the user may not care whether others see the information on their screen.
In other situations, however, the information may be of a more sensitive or private nature. Such information may include personal finance information, corporate account information or other data that is best kept to the eyes of the owner of that information. In order to ease such concerns, computing devices or software programs running on the computing devices may have document redaction mechanisms that remove the document from view. For instance, if a user was viewing a sensitive document in public and determined that others were attempting to view the documents on the user's computer, the user may be able to implement the redaction mechanism to remove the document from view entirely.
Many times, however, some portions of a document are less sensitive than others. Thus, a user may wish to view the less sensitive portions of the document while in public, and view the sensitive material at another time or place more conducive to such viewing. Current redaction mechanisms, however, are limited in how they are able to redact material from a computer's display. Either the document is displayed in its entirety or is completely removed from view. There is no middle ground.